Arguing about whether a hot dog is a sandwich makes as much sense as arguing whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. The answer always depends on the larger context. Classifying food combinations may be a fool's errand in the long run, as dishes from around the world exist along an amazing spectrum, but we still try. The question that rules over food classification is, do we define food by its structure, or its ingredients?
The reality is, a vanilla soy latte is a type of three-bean soup.
Er, maybe ingredients don't work so well. Enter the Cube Rule of Food, which classifies combination foods by the location of the starch. The classifications are toast, sandwich, taco, sushi, quiche, and calzone. Most of what we eat regularly belongs in one of those categories. Since structure matters and ingredients don't in this system, you find that Pop Tarts are calzones, pigs in a blanket are sushi, and a hot dog is a taco. It makes perfect sense. Pie? Pie can exist in several categories, depending on how it is made and how it is sliced. There is an extra category for foods with no starch, meaning that steak is classified as salad. That's just the beginning of the weirdness you'll find in the Cube Rule. -via Metafilter
Last Tuesday in Chicago, a security camera caught footage of a UPS delivery driver bringing a package. He was welcomed by a squirrel! Instead of panicking, he found delight in the encounter. This should put a smile on your face the way it did to this guy. -via Boing Boing
For 70 years, Faith Lutheran Church in Forest Lake, Minnesota, served an annual lutefisk dinner on the second Tuesday in December. The community was settled by Scandinavian immigrants, and the church served a traditional dinner of lutefisk, lefse, boiled potatoes, meatballs, and other traditional dishes. The church has decided to discontinue the feast this year, and to get the community's attention, pastor John Klawiter wrote an obituary for the dinner, published in the Forest Lake Times. I guess it's true that more people read the obituaries than any other section of the newspaper. People outside of Forest Lake might think that the cause of death would be lack of participation due to a waning taste for lutefisk (a gelatinous dish made by reconstituting dried whitefish with lye), but that wasn't the case. Five hundred people came to eat last year. Go figure.
Ultimately, it was the aging of the volunteers that helped contribute to the decision to finally pull the plug on the 70-year tradition.
“We gathered earlier this fall,” Zarembinski said. “The process begins with a head count. Who is still able to stand to help in the kitchen? Who is no longer able to drive and will need a ride or isn’t able to come at all? Who is in a nursing home and isn’t able to help as they have in the past? Who has passed away in the last year? Who has moved south away from the cold already?” There’s a theme here.
“The average age of the most recent core group of volunteers chairpersons is approximately 75 years old,” she said. “Not only is nobody getting any younger, but it has become more and more difficult to find volunteers that would have an impact on lowering that average age significantly.”
One day I wondered how old the song "Carol of the Bells" is, so I looked it up. The song was written in 1914 by Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych. It was based on the Ukrainian folk chant called "Shchedryk," which goes back much further. It was not a Christmas song.
The original folk story related in the song was associated with the coming New Year, which, in pre-Christian Ukraine, was celebrated with the coming of spring in April. The original Ukrainian title translates to "the generous one"[4] or is perhaps derived from the Ukrainian word for bountiful (shchedryj),[3] and tells a tale of a swallow flying into a household to proclaim the bountiful year that the family will have.[5]
With the introduction of Christianity to Ukraine and the adoption of the Julian calendar, the celebration of the New Year was moved from April to January, and the holiday with which the chant was originally associated became Malanka (Ukrainian: Щедрий вечір Shchedry vechir), the eve of the Julian New Year (the night of 13–14 January in the Gregorian calendar). The songs sung for this celebration are known as Shchedrivky.
The song was first performed by students at Kiev University in December 1916, but the song lost popularity in Ukraine shortly after the Soviet Union took hold.[5] It was introduced to Western audiences by the Ukrainian National Chorus during its 1919 concert tour of Europe and the Americas, where it premiered in the United States on October 5, 1921 to a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall.[3] The original work was intended to be sung a cappella by mixed four-voice choir.[5] Two other settings of the composition were also created by Leontovych: one for women's choir (unaccompanied) and another for children's choir with piano accompaniment. These are rarely performed or recorded.
Asked to write English lyrics for a performance on the NBC radio network in 1936, Peter J. Wilhousky, an American musician of Ukrainian descent, centered the English version around bells, because the tune reminded him of hand bells. The original Ukrainian lyrics translate as:
Shchedryk, shchedryk, a shchedrivka [New Year's carol]; A little swallow flew [into the household] and started to twitter, to summon the master: "Come out, come out, O master [of the household], look at the sheep pen, there the ewes have yeaned and the lambkins have been born Your goods [livestock] are great, you will have a lot of money, [by selling them].
If not money, then chaff: [from all the grain you will harvest] you have a dark-eyebrowed [beautiful] wife." Shchedryk, shchedryk, a shchedrivka, A little swallow flew.
The performance in the video above was recorded in Kiev in 2011.
People run all kinds of risks to eat food that can be dangerous. Last week, we heard about how cherries and milk together can kill you. Luckily, that was a myth. At one time, Europeans thought that tomatoes were poison. With all the misinformation about food, it's time to turn to the experts.
For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of food historians and anthropologists to nominate their candidates for the all-time most dangerous food. There was one sticky pattern, but mostly, their takes varied wildly; collectively they cover pretty much all of the non-fruit/vegetable parts of the food pyramid. If you like eating, and also enjoy being alive, you might want to take their opinions to heart.
The different experts picked different foods for different reasons. Some can be deadly if you don't select, prepare, or store it correctly. Others are safe in small amounts, but contribute to early death if you overindulge over time. Some are vectors for disease, and some are just bad for everyone because its production is destroying the environment. It is telling that the last four experts chose the same food. Read all the opinions on the most dangerous food at Gizmodo.
You can get a personal photograph put on all kinds of household items now. Be warned, you're going to have to watch this video twice to catch what you missed the first time around. I really don't want to say any more than that. -via Everlasting Blort
Redditor squatch1217 shows off his backyard banana harvest. He says that in central California, frost usually destroys bananas before the fruit reaches maturity, but this year he got lucky. Amidst the phallic references and jokes about using a banana for scale, commenters have decided that this is not necessarily a runt, but a banana that's a different variety from the Cavendish bananas we are used to. Squatch1217 says they are delicious, and about two bites each. He has at least 100 of them, so he might make banana bread. That may sound appealing, but it will take a lot of peeling.
Everyone experiences stress; it's just part of life. But sustained, daily stress can affect our bodies and brains- and not for the better. That's just what you needed to hear on top of all that stress, right? AsapSCIENCE has the details.
The French midwife Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray was a master of her craft. She was also an educator, training thousands of midwives, doctors, and surgeons in the intricacies of childbirth beginning in 1759. Du Coudray used an amazing model, seen above, of a uterus, placenta, and fetus to show her students how the process of birth works. It is made of leather and fabric, and has held up well. Now more than 250 years later, the model is in the Flaubert Museum and History of Medicine in Rouen, France. But you can see several views of how it works, and read more about du Coudray at Flashbak. -Thanks, WTM!
Back in 2007, crazy man Colin Furze (previously at Neatorama) built a motordrome, or a "Wall of Death" out of around 850 pallets. It started him on a career making YouTube videos about the strange things he builds. You can see the videos of him building it, crashing in it, and successfully riding his 70cc Honda scooter in it. Now, he decided to get rid of the "rotting pile of pallets" by sending it up in a glorious blaze, to the music of a song written about it. -via Digg
Rusty Blazenhoff wrote about Tim Klien's jigsaw puzzle montages at Boing Boing, and it turned out to be her biggest blog post ever, even bigger than Swineapple. Neatorama was one of the earlier sites to pick it up, and over the next couple weeks, Klein was inundated with messages and inquiries about buying his puzzle montages.
Want one of Tim's pieces? Get in line. He's sold every single one of his current pieces (he delighted in selling his art to STRANGERS for the very first time) and there is a waiting list for future ones.
Imagine the life of Ossi Saarinen. He is a dedicated nature photographer, out to prove that Finland's forests are as magical as you've heard (after all, Santa Claus lives there). His gorgeous photographs lead you to believe he has the Snow White touch that attracts woodland creatures to pose for pictures.
Finnish animals appear to be very mysterious, fascinating and charming just like they've stepped out from fairy tales. Ossi does not skip the chances to capture the beauty of Finnish wildlife either. He believes that every encounter between the animals and humans becomes an unforgettably amazing experience (Well, let’s not talk about the encounter with a bear).
Kyle Stultz and Allie Johnstone of Anchorage, Alaska, were awakened by the doorbell at 1:30 in the morning on Wednesday. But there was no one at the door. Who would play a prank in the middle of the long Alaskan night? A look at their security video revealed that it was a large, clueless moose that had wandered into the garage, found the space too confining, backed its butt up against their door while trying to turn around, and pressed the doorbell button. The moose managed to make a clean getaway from the scene of the crime. -via Boing Boing
When European explorers first traveled to the Americas, they found strange and wonderful creatures unknown back home. However, these explorers weren't artists, and relied on others to illustrate what they described. André Thevet was a French missionary who spent ten weeks in Brazil and documented his experiences in his 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (Singularities of France Antarctique). Artist Jean Cousin was enlisted to illustrate the work, which included an introduction to the sloth, an animal that was completely new to Thevet's French readers.
Thevet started work on Les Singularitez almost immediately upon returning to France. The book became a compilation of his own ventures as well as second-hand knowledge, including descriptions of South America obtained from French sailors. His text suggests that he had some first-hand experience with sloths, as the description is much more accurate than the illustration attributed to Cousin. Thevet writes that it has "the size of a very large African monkey" and "three claws, four fingers long ... with which it climbs trees where it stays more than on the ground. Its tail is three fingers long, having very little hair.” Rather than take in some of the nuances, the illustration focuses on Thevet’s description of a "little bear" with a head "almost like that of a baby” and translates that to a long-clawed bear with an actual human face. Nevertheless, Thevet had some imaginative stretches of his own, as he also states that it was "never seen eating" and that the local people had watched "to see if it would feed, but all was in vain."
If you think that's inaccurate, you should see the depiction of the "Succarath," a creature we don't even know the inspiration for. Read about Thevet's travels and the book that resulted at Smithsonian.
What's the fastest way to get out of traveling to another town for a football match? A team death! The Irish Leinster Senior League is dealing with the fallout from the Ballybrack team reporting the death of their player Fernando Nuno LaFuente in a traffic accident, which postponed Ballybrack's game in Arklow last month. Not only did Ballybrack not play, but there was a moment of silence and the other participating teams wore black armbands. Players and fans mourned the loss of LaFuente on social media. Meanwhile, LaFuente, who had simply moved from Dublin to Galway, watched the scheme unfold. He thought it was funny, but made sure to call his mother about the hoax.
The Spaniard, who has moved to Galway and no longer plays for Ballybrack, said the club contacted him last week to let him know he may hear reports he had been involved in an accident.
He added: "I was aware there was going to be some story on me but I thought it was going to be me breaking a leg or something like that.
"I was at home yesterday after my work finished. I was playing some video games. They told me: 'You're a celebrity.'
While it's not clear who came up with the cunning scheme that had totally unforeseeable consequences, Ballybrack's secretary has since resigned. Why did Ballybrack want to avoid the game? LaFuente doubts they were afraid of playing Arklow.
"I think they had a rough time getting players," he said.
"They don't play football professionally. Most of them have regular jobs and some of them work in the UK. I think that was the issue. It was nothing major."
